Sunday, March 16, 2008

I had promised my son to take him back to the pond one last time before he goes back to school tomorrow. I picked up some night crawlers from Wally world and we headed to the pond for an hour as we had to be back early.

The conditions today were cloudy skies and windy. I decided to still take along my 2wt as I would try to keep the wind behind me.

The night crawlers I bought were huge and so we had to cut them up into chunks that would fit on the size 10 hook my son was using. It was a dirty job but once we did that, my son started catching fish.

We found a corner of the pond where the wind was to our back and was a bit more sheltered that I could cast well enough. It also happened to contain plenty of bluegill so we stayed in that area for the entire time.

As I was bringing in a rather large bluegill, I saw what looked like a 2lb bass cruising like a shark near the struggling bluegill. I called my son over and we saw the bass take the entire bluegill in its mouth and start heading to deeper water! My 2wt started bending deeply and then the bass released the bluegill though it kept close to it until I pulled it from the water and released it.

Even though today was a short outing, it was still a fun and memorable time with the kids.

On Friday I took my son and youngest daughter to the same pond we went to last weekend. The day turned out to be a very warm day with temperatures reaching into the 90s. We waited until about an hour before sunset to start fishing as by then there was some shade available and the fish should be eager to bite.

Earlier in the day, we had stopped at a trading store in town and picked up some red worms and so this was the primary bait for today. It took my son a while to figure out how to keep the worms from falling off the hook. Eventually, once he did, he caught his first fish of the day; a small bluegill.

My son continued catching bluegills pretty steadily. They were small at first and progressively got bigger. There are some really big 'gills in that pond! We also saw a huge crawfish walking along the shoreline.

My daughter found a friend to play with at the pond. Another gentleman had showed up at the pond to fish and brought his daughter that looked to be 4 or 5. My daughter, being a socialite, went over to make a new friend and they basically ran around the pond searching for plastic lures and playing with the worms.

Since my son was doing really well on his own, I decided to take my 4wt to fish along with him. I was using a size 8 Cypert minnow fly and caught so many bluegills in the 7" to 9" size that I lost count. We did catch one small green sunfish but primarily the pond was filled with healthy bluegill. I did also catch one small bass and I figure there are much larger bass in there but I didn't managed any.

Sunset came around and it started getting dark. My son didn't want to leave. As the frogs started to sing, I switched over to a small Gurgler top water fly and as soon as it hit the water, I caught another big bluegill. Eventually I couldn't see my cast around 8:20pm and I told the kids it was time to leave. My son asked me if I had any of my headlamps in the truck so we could keep fishing. I told him we would come back some other day.

While I was packing up the rods and the worms, the kids rolled each other down the steep grass embankment.

I intend to take the kids one more time this weekend before their spring break vacation comes to an end. It is supposed to be pretty windy today with gusts in the 20 to 30mph category. I hope not since that pond would be great to try my 2wt on. I'll post up later as to how today's trip went. Hopefully, it will be as good or better than Friday's.

Saturday, March 08, 2008

Last weekend I took my son to Cabelas so he could pick out a new fishing rod/reel combo. We ended up selecting a new 6' spinning rod and reel combo made by Quantum. Today we took it out to a new pond to give it a test drive.

As is a policy of mine, when taking the kids fishing I myself don't fish so that I can devote my time to coaching them.

We picked up some small meal worms and proceeded to fish the pond. It is essentially a retention pond about a 1/4 acre in size at the entrance of a subdivision. I was told it held sizable bluegill so I thought we should take a look.

In the middle of the pond is a large fountain that I expect circulates the water to reduce algae growth. The center of the pond seems at least to be three feet deep. My son started fishing on one end where we had seen some fish as we came close to the pond. However, after about 10 minutes or so we moved on to the opposite end.

While I was checking the count of meal worms we had, my son caught the first bluegill which was fairly nice sized. We photographed and released it.

We moved around the pond and had one other bite in the hour and a half we were there. Even though the fishing was slow, we observed the shoreline of the pond had hundreds of snail shells along it as well as baby frogs jumping into the water as we walked by.

It was a good time and I was very happy taking my son out. It's spring break for his school this week so I plan to have a couple more outings. We might even try fishing for white bass in one of the rivers in which they come in about this time of the year to spawn. I'll have to check the reports though before heading out there.